Transformers’ Michael Bay is Spielberg 2.0 and a genius filmmaker – he should be revered not reviled

Whenever a Michael Bay movie hits cinemas, the cash tills begin to shake. His films have made more than $3.6bn in the US alone – and billions more around the globe. Transformers: Rise of the Beasts, which he produced and which crashes onto UK screens later this month, is likely to continue a seismic winning streak that stretches back almost 30 years to his debut feature, Bad Boys, in 1995.

Bay is arguably the most successful filmmaker of his generation – and yet he is also one of the most reviled. Critics tend to hate his work. He has multiple nominations for the Golden Raspberry awards, given to the worst pictures of the year, and the Alliance of Women Film Journalists once nominated him for a Sexist Pig of the Year award. Thus far, Oscar and Bafta voters have been giving him a very wide berth (although his films do sometimes pick up accolades for their VFX or sound editing).

This is the Bay paradox. He is a genius, but he makes loud and objectionable movies. His technique is breathtaking. Even his detractors acknowledge that you won’t find many other filmmakers with his pyromaniacal flair for blowing things up on camera or his ability to stage chases, heists and gunfights. What most of his films have lacked, though, are those qualities that reviewers tend to pick up on: depth of characterisation, emotion, empathy, humour, lyricism.

“I don’t read the critics,” Bay recently proclaimed. “I make movies for audiences.” That is probably just as well, given the brickbats that have been flying in his direction over the last three decades. Strangely, the best-reviewed of the director’s features have tended to be the ones that have made the least money. His recent picture, the explosive chase thriller Ambulance (2022), received respectful notices and yet earned a fraction of the revenues generated by his bigger, cheesier blockbusters.

The late Roger Ebert was one of Bay’s fiercest detractors, continually skewering his movies in the pages of the Chicago Sun-Times. “The movie is an assault on the eyes, the ears, the brain, common sense and the human desire to be entertained,” he wrote about Bay’s disaster movie Armageddon in 1998. “No matter what they’re charging to get in, it’s worth more to get out.” Ebert was even more antagonistic toward Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen (2009), calling it “a horrible experience of unbearable length,” likening it to the “music of hell” and advising anyone who wanted to save the price of a ticket “to get a kid to start banging pots and pans together. Then close your eyes and use your imagination.” The director’s reaction to such abuse was simply to point to the box office results.

“Michael Bay has a mainline to the testosterone glands of the American male,” Frances McDormand commented astutely to GQ after appearing in one of Bay’s Transformers movies, Dark of the Moon (2011). McDormand identified why American theatre owners love him. He makes adolescent wish fulfilment fantasies. Teenage boys flock to his work.

Bay emerged during the MTV era, after all, and served as the young apprentice of Don Simpson and Jerry Bruckheimer, then the brashest producers in Hollywood. The duo behind Top Gun and Beverly Hills Cop talent-spotted him in the early 1990s when he was making commercials and pop videos (for Donny Osmond, Meat Loaf and Tina Turner, among others). “Michael had such strong vision and the will to get it on camera,” Bruckheimer explained to film trade publication Variety.

The early Nineties was the period when Quentin Tarantino was enrapturing the Sundance Festival with Reservoir Dogs (1992) and when aspiring young directors began their careers by making grungy, low-budget movies paid for on their parents’ credit cards. That wasn’t how Bay started. He went in big. Bad Boys combines sex, fast cars, heists, explosions and buddy movie banter between Will Smith and Martin Lawrence… and that’s all in the first few minutes. When the budget ran out at one point during production, Bay paid for one of the film’s main stunts – in which a body falls from an exploding airplane – out of his own pocket, spending a reported $25,000. The Porsche from the opening scene, which Smith calls too sleek for Lawrence to be eating a burger inside, belonged to Bay himself.

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As Smith later observed, Bay knew from the start how to “run and gun” – meaning how to hustle and make a film on the hoof. “Michael was comfortable behind the eight ball. He never had enough money, he never had enough time.” The director later claimed that Bad Boys was chronically underfunded and had a half-baked script. “Sony didn’t believe in the movie, because two Black actors don’t sell overseas. They had no faith in it,” he told Entertainment Weekly. By his own account, he drew on his experiences making commercials and pop promos to rescue a project which would otherwise have fallen apart.

By the director’s second feature The Rock (1996), starring Nicolas Cage, Sean Connery and Ed Harris, “A Michael Bay film” had moved to the top of the credits. Bay was barely 30 (he was born in 1965) but Simpson and Bruckheimer were already willing to entrust him with an enormous budget. Bay still complained it wasn’t enough and later paid tribute to Connery for standing up to the studio accountants at Disney and insisting that yet more money was made available.

Bad Boys and The Rock had elements which later Bay movies have lacked, notably plenty of comic badinage among the lead actors in between the action sequences. In his early scenes in The Rock, when he’s wearing his hair long, singing hippy ballads in the shower and cracking jokes relentlessly, Connery seems closer to Billy Connolly than to James Bond. He plays John Patrick Mason, a former British intelligence agent who is the only prisoner to have escaped from Alcatraz. Cage has his comic moments, too, as the Beatles-loving FBI scientist. Cage and Connery worked surprisingly well together. It helped that Aaron Sorkin and Tarantino both made uncredited contributions to the screenplay.

The Rock was a big film but seems almost like a chamber piece by comparison to all the bloated blockbusters Bay made in subsequent years: Armageddon (1998), Pearl Harbor (2001) and then all those mind-numbing Transformers movies inspired by a range of Hasbro robot toys.

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For all his bombast, Bay can be surprisingly self-deprecating. When he was a teenager, he had a summer job as a clerk for Lucasfilm in LA. The job entailed him filing away storyboards for Steven Spielberg’s new project Raiders of the Lost Ark. As he told website Collider, he wasn’t impressed with them at all and warned his school friends that Spielberg’s new movie was “going to suck.” A year and a half later, when he saw the film, he was dumbfounded at how good it was. “That’s what I want to do,” he said to himself.

On some levels, Spielberg and Bay are soul brothers. As kids, both used to make home movies and to experiment with toy train crashes. They share the same mastery of technique. Spielberg recruited Bay to direct Transformers… and later advised him to stop making them after three instalments (advice Bay didn’t take). The difference between them is that Bay hasn’t got a Schindler’s List, a Saving Private Ryan or an autobiographical title like The Fabelmans on his resumé. He’s been far too busy blowing things up to tackle weighty social or political issues or to look inward.

One of the most persuasive defenders of the director is his old film studies professor, Jeanine Basinger, who taught him at Wesleyan University. In an essay on Armageddon for the Criterion Collection, she calls him “a master of movement, light, colour, and shape – and also of chaos, razzle-dazzle, and explosion”. She also describes how, as an 18-year-old freshman student, he showed her his still photographs. They were “astonishing – revealing an amazing eye for composition, an instinct for capturing movement, and an inherent understanding of implied narrative.”

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Speak to those who’ve worked with him and they likewise marvel at his work ethic and his hard-driving perfectionism. “He is a very dynamic person,” Maltese actor Frida Cauchi – who appeared in Bay’s 13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi (2016) – tells me. “He knows exactly what he wants. He is very well prepared and he is very energetic.” Cauchi talks of one sequence filmed in Valletta which takes place in a busy market. “There were lots and lots of extras, lots and lots of dust and wind.” In spite of the commotion, Bay noticed “every single detail.” There were hundreds of people on set but if an extra in the background stood in the wrong place, he would immediately notice it. She also remembers him grabbing the camera and lying on the ground to catch a shot of the sun setting before night fell. The Maltese cast and crew members liked and respected Bay, too. “He gives you a lot of trust. I found him a very kind person,” Cauchi adds.

These days, Bay is more active as a producer than as a director. He has been involved in hit franchises including The Purge and the A Quiet Place films, and is currently working on a true crime documentary series. The new Transformers movie, which had its world premiere last week, is tracking to be another massive summer hit. Given that Bay hasn’t directed it, reviews may well be more sympathetic than if he’d been behind the camera.

Nonetheless, it surely won’t be too long until his reputation takes an upswing. Critics have been battering Bay for almost 30 years. Generally, when a filmmaker takes punishment for that long, attitudes eventually change. It’s a fair bet that the older he gets, the more respect Bay will be accorded. After all, he is Hollywood’s king of cacophony, the one who has always had his hand firmly on the detonator. When it comes to mayhem and noise on screen, no one can match him. He is the true lord of destruction.

‘Transformers: Rise of the Beasts’ is released 8 June